Six tips to help you survive the opening hours of roguelike RPG For the King, out on PS4 today

For The King is a strategic RPG that blends tabletop and roguelike elements together in a challenging adventure that spans the realms, and it’s out today on PlayStation 4! To celebrate the launch, For The King is 20% off for PlayStation Plus users starting today.

The world of For The King can be unforgiving, so here are six tips to help you survive on your first excursion into the wilds of Fahrul.

1. Start with the ‘For The King’ adventure

When playing For The King for the first time, you should start with the ‘For The King’ base campaign. In this adventure, you will battle against Chaos as you try to solve the King’s murder and restore order to the land. For The King is absolutely bursting at the seams with content, so make sure to give yourself a fighting chance by learning the basics first!

These are the rest of the adventures to choose from:

• Frozen Expanse: Brave the cold and go beyond the Forest as you search for lost treasure in a frosty wonderland of terror.
• Into the Deep: Explore the deep and its many hidden secrets in an adventure spanning the high seas.
• Dungeon Crawl: Explore the lands of Fahrul in a free-form adventure to locate and destroy the Chaos generators deep within five deadly dungeons.
• Hildebrant’s Cellar: How far can you explore Hildebrant’s Cellar and what awaits those who dare enter? Unlock unique Lore Store Items and Special Achievements by reaching new depths in this Endless Dungeon challenge mode.
• Gold Rush Un-cooperative mode: Brave the cursed Midnight Woods and its haunted crypts in this ‘friendly’, multiplayer-only competitive mode.

2. If it’s your first time, definitely start on Apprentice Difficulty

While Apprentice mode may be seen as an ‘Easy mode,’ the world of Fahrul is against you and with the tabletop influence, your rolls are defined in part by luck. If it’s your first time through the campaign, the Apprentice difficulty will scale things a bit more in your favour with more lives, less enemy health, and also give you better starting items such as the ‘Godsbeard’ for recovering health.

Higher difficulties make the game harder by giving enemies more health, giving you fewer starting items, and increasing the economy inflation, but you’ll be rewarded with more Lore and payout.

3. Expand your gameplay with the Lore Store

Progressing in For The King by completing objectives such as quests, bounties or singular encounters will reward you with Lore points. Lore is a form of currency that carries between playthroughs and allows you to expand your gameplay options. This allows you to unlock helpful locations, special encounters, powerful items, and even special new characters (classes in the traditional sense). This keeps the game fresh through multiple playthroughs as you try your best to take down the various adventures.

4. Choose your characters wisely

When starting a brand-new adventure, you are asked to choose your starting characters, based on what are traditionally known as classes. There are 11 playable characters, with four available from the get-go:

• The Blacksmith is your typical Tank character, wielding a Hammer and Shield. While they have the lowest speed, they have the highest vitality and when coupled with their ability Taunt, drawing enemy attention to themselves. It’s definitely required.
• The Minstrel forms the basis of your support, serenading your allies with a lute to encourage and inspire them. Their fantastical performances have a chance to debuff enemies, confusing them for turns at a time during combat.
• The Hunter, wielding a powerful bow and arrow, can perform devastating shots that allow their attacks to ignore armor, allowing you to directly attack the health points of armored foes to take them down quicker.
• Rounding out the starting selection, the Scholar can fling powerful Area of Effect attacks hitting multiple foes at once, as well as casting spells that ignore any elemental resistances that the enemy may have.

Each character offers various options to expand your playstyle with different abilities, weapons and stats. Some are better for defense or support, while others have devastating offensive capabilities. With a maximum of three, having a well-balanced team is extremely important.

5. Head to a town for bounties and items

When you start For The King, even after making informed choices about the classes you’re going to play, the world is going to be against you, and it’s good for you to immediately get to grips with your surroundings.

Explore the locales around and especially in the towns. Towns will allow you to obtain Bounties that upon completion will give you some much needed coin. In Towns you will also find Merchants that will offer you the base healing item ‘Godsbeard’ — this is essential if you’re looking to survive the encounters ahead of you, so stock up!

6. Manage your Focus

Focus Points are a limited resource that allow you to guarantee interactions. For The King has a board game based approach, so think of a Focus as guaranteeing a roll in your favour, whether it’s a hit chance, a trap defuse or additional movement points.  As said previously, however, they are limited and must be managed over the course of time between towns.

Characters tend to have around four max focus points. These points can be recovered by staying at inns in towns, or resting in other locations such as friendly encampments, so use them sparingly!

I hope you’re looking forward to delving into the world of Fahrul, and don’t miss out on the 20% PlayStation Discount for the launch of the title! If you have any questions about the game let me know in the comments below and I’ll be happy to answer them.